cpe week one reflection
How shall I sing to God
When life is filled with bleakness
Empty and chill
Breaking my will
God’s Imperfect Creation. God’s creative power and flawless genius is overrated! This was and continues to be the theme of my first week in PGH. After being exposed to the different cases in the Ortho Ward (to think that is just one ward!), how can I still possibly believe with conviction what we were so convincingly and conveniently taught in theology that God created us out of love and that he exclaimed “very good!” after creating man?
Where is the love? Does not love make everything right and perfect?! His “very good” standard is certainly low, sub-standard at best. Maybe he should not have rushed the creation of the world. He probably should have spent more than seven days in order to carefully design everything. Maybe then I could believe that he was lovingly creating us.
Or maybe he was. He just stopped loving, caring and giving a damn after. What a father!
Sometimes the default and sound theological explanation is to blame human freedom and error in judgment, and for those with new age bents, fate, the arrangement of the stars or their birth sign horoscope for the day. But I believe there are just some things that can justifiably be attributed to this feeling-perfect God!
I have been picking a fight with God this past week asking him to explain all these “anomalies” vis-à-vis his perfect creation-loving creator thesis. Not once have I stepped out of the ward after talking to a patient in order to take a breather to look up to the heavens with teary eyes and a very agitated heart to shout “WHY?” from my innermost recesses and to curse God in order to catch his attention.
So far he has been silent. I’m sure he’s rattled trying to find answers!
Sickness and Life. Sickness sucks life out of people. Aside from the obvious depletion of physical life, resulting to weakness and degeneration, I also see how sickness sucks out life taken in its general sense.
Sickness not only sucks out life from the patient, but also from the loved ones, relatives and friends, surrounding, worrying about and attending to them. When one is seriously ill, life cannot just go on normally for the rest as if nothing happened. Life stops for parents when their newborn depends on a respirator for his life. The quality of life of children lowers when the only breadwinner gets disabled by a vehicular accident. Life is radically altered by the anxiety of having a sick member of the family.
Illness also sucks out life in the financial/material sense. Family funds and savings, if any, are literally drained to support a sick patient’s medications and treatments. Most in PGH even borrow money, pulling them deeper into the pit of the difficult life of being in debt.
It also sucks out life from both patients and their families because sometimes it is just too difficult, and at times, even impossible to hope given the facts and circumstances facing and impinging on them.
No wonder visitation of patients is so draining. It sucks out life from me too, leaving me exhausted and tired after a whole day of interacting with them.
How could a God of life and love allow all these to happen? Why is death, that is, life sucked out, all around? I really think he is overrated.
Life-giving Ministry – A Divine Intervention. However, in the three instances I was so moved to pray over patients and their attendants, it was his name I still called upon. How come? Why the continued faith despite the hard facts?
While walking the aisles of PGH, I also witnessed little life-giving miracles. There are realities in PGH that fight the life-sucking reign of death brought about by sickness. Attendants transcending comforts to give comfort, a cellphone call from a sister in Albay bringing a priceless smile to a four year old patient, a wife’s loving and concerned stroking of her husband’s head, doctors operating for free and giving free medicines to needy patients, social workers working the rounds to be of help as much as possible—all these sacrifices give life.
Being super-human, that is, to be more than we usually or comfortably are, for the sake of an-other is the divine working in and thru us. There might just be truth in the biblical verse saying that we were created in the image and likeness of God. When we love, care, and show concern, we go beyond our humanity and reflect God.
God is still here, in this bleak situation, after all. He is in all of us, working thru us. We have the responsibility to further care for and give life to creation amidst the culture of death surrounding us. Wow! I think he just answered my questions, pointing to me and saying: “You are there for a reason!”
In addition to this, I also have my own rich and sure deposit of God-experiences I am able to withdraw from whenever my faith is challenged. Even though I have been shaken by what I have seen (so far) in PGH, I am able to hold on firmly, though not without any struggles, to my God’s faithful and indomitable love, firm enough to share the same conviction to the patients I visit.
And so it is still rational to hope and trust the God of life, despite contrary and conclusive evidence that leads me to believe otherwise.
I’ll sing thru my pain
Angrily or aching
Crying or complaining
This is my song
I’ll sing it with love
